Hospitals hoping to attract patients and build their brands are teaming up with medical-screening companies to promote tests aimed at consumers worried about potentially deadly heart disease or strokes. What their promotions don’t say is that an influential government panel recommends against using many of the tests on people without symptoms or risk factors…

What will happen:
The probability of a Beta Error (the error where the test falsely finds something wrong) will be very high. These hospitals know that if they scare the living daylights out of people, the people will sign up for a myriad of tests – making the hospital tons of money that would not have been spent on healthcare otherwise.

Tim: I can also relate to that problem. Once I went through over ten different costly tests, many invasive, just because I had some abdominal pain and the doctors never found out what I had until someone told me it could something pretty simple…and bingo, simple it was. I have a hard time thinking these doctors didn’t know. This is related to the issue of how tests are just assigned needlessly, while driving the costs up for consumers.

More over-spending for unnecessary tests. Great. Can’t wait to hear about the next developments of how our health care system continues to waste money and profit at the expense of the average patient. Disgusting.

Maria – Costs have to play a part. If we all got screened on a daily basis we’d never miss anything but it’d cost a lot. The point is we have limited funds. Do we spend $1 billion dollars on testing if it results in one life saved? We have to make choices on the most cost efficient means. If a test can do good – it may still be a net cost but worth it. So just because it costs doesn’t me we don’t do it. But let’s do it rationally.

There’s nothing wrong with testing for disease. The problem is that consumers are not evaluating whether or not to get these tests on the basis of what they are willing to pay for. A problem with a health care system where insurers and Medicare pay for most bills is that patients are an easy mark for scammers like hospitals who see it as part of their business model to get people to seek care for things they don’t need.

It’s almost like if roofing contractors had a way to influence the weather.